Tuesday saw a tornado wreak destruction as it tore through Westmoreland, a small city in Northeastern Kansas. Nearly two dozen homes were destroyed in its wake, and one person died, according to authorities.
In a post to their Facebook account, officials in Pottawatomie County said that the tornado struck on Thursday evening. First responders conducted grid searches in the city to search for injured and missing people, and to survey the storm’s damage.
In a news release, a spokesperson for the county confirmed the fatality, though the name of the deceased was withheld pending notification of next of kin. Three other people were injured, according to the spokesperson, but none of those who were injured are in critical condition.
Images posted to the internet showed damaged homes, uprooted trees, a flipped semi-truck, and short of the funnel cloud making its way across the ground. The tornado’s swath of destruction consumed five outbuildings and twenty two homes, along with three RVs in an RV park that was in its path. Westmoreland, which is about 45 miles north of Topeka, suffered a power outage because of the event.
It’s the latest event in an already exciting tornado season, which has seen storm chasers knocked off the road by overturned semis, neighborhoods leveled, and all manner of intense videos posted to TikTok and other social media sites.
The storm in Westmoreland comes hot on the heels of a series of tornadoes that ripped their way through Oklahoma on Sunday, injuring over a hundred people and killing at least four. Nebraska and Iowa also suffered twister touch-downs on the preceding Friday, leaving businesses and homes leveled as well as one person dead. These were just a few of among the one-hundred six tornadoes detected by weather services on Friday, April 26 all up and down Tornado Alley, which runs between Corpus Christie, Texas in the south and the Great Lakes in the north.
The entire midwest remains on high alert, as more storm fronts are expected in the coming days.
